Code availability for TPV Developers is planed for the end of the week. They will link to it from the Project Snowstorm wiki pages. This means TPV’s can support it once meshes come to the main grid. It also lets OpenSim get started on compatible mesh support. OpenSim with a module add-on has had meshes for over a year.

11:28 AM – \o/ It works pretty well. It is certainly usable. There are some gotchas and small problems in the user interface. But, those will get fixed.

If you plan to try applying standard texturing, make sure to do an inventory load. If all your textures are not loaded, the texture selection list keeps bouncing to the top as more items are loaded into inventory. Very frustrating.

10:45 PM – 🙁 Blender 2.54 is having problems exporting meshes skinned to AV rigging. It seems Blender 2.49b handles it correctly. So, if you are making things that have to skin to the AV, use the earlier version of Blender.

Tutorial

Machinimatrix is making video tutorials using Blender 2.49 to make the meshes and shows importing them to SL. The first two of a series are up. See: The Meshes Trail (Part I and II)

When I tried it out aournd 6pm pacific time it wasn’t working 100%. I was able to successfully preview and upload makehuman meshes converted into collada but I couldn’t see anything except for a bunch of floating triangles in a vaguely human shape. Other people were seeing the same things but I ran into a couple of people who said they’d had no problems earlier in the day so the servers were probably overloaded.

On another note I noticed something interesting: you can link together prims, sculpties and meshes in a single linkset which offers the possibility of greatly reduced lag hair.

It also means the concerns of those who can’t create their own meshes are vastly overdone since they will be able to link together pre-created meshes by themselves the same way you can do now with prims and sculpties.